I am not Prince Hamlet.

Let us go then, you and I...

I've got it made. Living on borrowed credit, glasses askew and sweaters pulled tight around a small frame, I walk through carparks with inkstained fingertips and the harrowing gaze of the artist. I know the game, like stripping, carving pieces from yourself to sell to strangers. A painting here, a poem there. Shouldn't there be a line break here? How much can you pay for one?

It's cruel, to be perfectly honest, to pull the stories from yourself and to sell them to the highest bidder. I would like to gather them like coins and bury them, my secret treasure trove.

Old friends returning with the holiday. What have you been doing? I would like to tell them that I've done everything, turned the world about. Played the piano in dive bars, traveled the Himalayas, became a great artist who only wears black - no, white, and parries witty comments with the best of them. A little Dorothy Parker.

Instead, I write in journals with quill pens and pulls out bookmarked pages in Eliot's The Waste Land to comment on. Instead, I paint until all hours of the night with Patti Smith's Horses in the background. Instead, I'm learning different lessons, ones I'd never expected. How to cook puttanesca and which olives are the best. How to develop film. How to write a poem that explodes.

I never did get that tattoo. Never did run away to Berlin. But, I'm happy here, my friends, left alone down by rivers with ancient characters. Shorelines and shipwrecks. There are parts of myself that you would still recognize, the bitter tip of the grin, the arched brow. You'll still find the girl who rolled joints on linoleum floors, the angry Erinye who turned her stereo up too loudly and downed sneaked vodka. But, as I touch my inked fingertips to the bathroom mirror and study the wide face, the Indian cheekbones, the Scottish eyes and Irish nose, I see a serenity you would never recognize, a truer portion of myself, my Soul, that was left sealed and forgotten and beautifully unmarred.

We never did use the word happy then, did we?

This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.